mindmelda

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Posts by mindmelda

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  93

  The Bible, Why not Reliable?

  by sayitsnotso in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  okay here is my thread to discuss this.

  i believe the bible is inspired by god and reliable.

  many argue it's neither.

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  mindmelda

  "The notion that if everyone followed the morals of the bible the world would be a better place."

  Various mainstream churches been pushing Biblical morality for the last few thousand years in the Western World, and hon, look around....is the world a better place?

  No, no one practices it perfectly nor can you totally enforce it, but I imagine that most people in the Western World know that the Bible teaches that adultery, stealing, murder, greed and promiscuity are wrong. DUH!

  You're assuming that only Christians know these things are wrong too, but surprise, most Buddhists and Hindus etc believe they are wrong too!

  The WTS teaches people that they're the only bastion of morality in the world to demonize the rest of the world, but they're not doing a whole lot better at it. They just banish anyone who doesn't follow their version of Biblical morality, but these people still exist outside of their little world, so is that really making the world follow their version Biblical morality (and they're doing some of that wrong, anyway)?

  No, it's not even making their own members practice it. It's making themselves look good to themselves by shunning people who don't conform, that's all. It's not a solution that works even in their own organization, and especially not outside of it.
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  72

  Who Would You Like To See As President Of The USA In The Next Election?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  will it be obama or someone else?.

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  mindmelda

  The Mormon thing scares people off of Romney, but I can guarantee you if he'd been of a more mainstream religion that McCain would have had him as a running mate and fared better in the election.

  I still believe Palin lost the neo Con vote for McCain and that's what sunk him. She was bad strategy to bring in the Bush crowd, the moral conservatives. She basically is Bush in a dress. She reminds me of him with the religious homilies, the winking and the folksy maladeptness with words.

  She was Bush without the Bush name which has that 13T deficit smell on it now.
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  146

  What Stupid Things Were You Counseled For?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i've always been told that i have a very good personality, that i'm humorous, etc.. one elder called me over and said that i was "smiling too much".

  the other elders talked to the elder who counseled me and he came back to say that i should be like i was .

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  mindmelda

  For turning around to look at the clock too often during meetings when I was a teenager.

  The guy (an elder) who did it ended up beating the hell out of his wife and another guy who he thought she was having an affair with and going to jail.

  So much for his judgment. He was always correcting people, and he had bigger issues than anyone else, apparently.
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  72

  Who Would You Like To See As President Of The USA In The Next Election?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  will it be obama or someone else?.

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  mindmelda

  I'd be running as an Independent... just warning you. LOL

  I can't think of anyone at the moment I'd like to be president, but I had the same problem in the last election. All we have to choose from are people who make me nervous, currently.

  I think McCain would have made a good president in 2000, but he's already dated now, and frankly, he's too old and pissy. He missed his chance in 2000 and the GOP oopsied not making him their 2000 candidate, but hey, that's gonna happen until the Republicans kick the dumbass Moral Majority to the curb and quit allowing them to violate separation of religion and government.

  I don't mind people practicing religion privately, and even voting their beliefs, because they will, but quit giving them an official POLITICAL platform, for hell's sake.

  We'll never get religion out of the political process itself until we pull the teeth of the moral conservatives and inform them that they're a religiously motivated movement, not a political one, so they need to quit passing off their moral agendas as conservative politics.

  I had a feeling that Obama would be all talk and less action, because he just struck me that way, but I also don't expect miracles from anyone at this point, because we're in a hella mess.

  I do like Obama's vision in some ways, but it's not realistic. I'd like to see a better educated country than we have too, with better health care, and no one would argue with that in their right mind. The big arguments are about how to get that with the money we have. It's always about money in the end, and how to spend it.
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  10

  Funny things in augusts watchtower

  by bohm in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have been reading augusts watchtower between simulations today, and i stumbled upon some funny stuff in augusts watchtower.

  first off - the author of the second article makes a bold move by referring to ancient watchtowers.

  from the first page:.

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  mindmelda

  Change does not = improvement...evolution doesn't imply improvement, but merely change and adaptation. Adaptation works fairly slowly, too, so it's not like species can adapt to sudden change and prevent extinction, either. Its not magic or anything!

  I always wonder if anyone at the WTS has actually READ Darwin? Apparently not. I was shocked to find how non-threatening Origin of Species actually is after the boogey man the WTS has made of it.
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  99

  Why FAITH is actually a form of suicide

  by Terry in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i once heard a psychiatrist explain suicide as the ultimate act of self-preservation.

  sound weird?.

  counter-intuitive as that sounds, he went on to explain why.. when all you value in life is threatened you do whatever desperate act that will preserve that value.. destruction of self stops the ......process.....of consciously losing.

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  mindmelda

  If you mean that lying and deceiving people is soul destroying, (soul meaning the inner sense of self) which is as bad as actual murder, I agree. When you murder a person's aspirations and potential, it's about as evil as murdering them literally.

  Faith is such a tricky word. I'm not against putting faith in things that are worthy of it. The trouble is, it's really up to the individual to discover what they believe is worthy of investiture of faith. The bad thing about coercive religions, organizations, people, whatever is that they take away that perogative of each one of us to find what is worthy and invest ourselves and our energy into that and TELL US what we should be doing.

  We don't need that kind of control masquerading as benevolent guidance. It stunts our intellectual, moral and emotional capacity to have that done for us. A cup already full cannot be filled. If you already are told, manipulated into believing you have ultimate truth and are putting all your faith into that one thing, you have no reason to learn anything else, or grow from that learning.

  I think in a way, people who go into cults are looking for easy answers, pat solutions because they're in a bad place and don't want to grow, learn or be motivated anymore. They get you when you're depressed, sad, angry, confused or afraid and looking for those easy answers. It's so much easier to sell the snake oil to someone who is sick than to someone who is healthy, after all.

  The scary thing is, we all get that way occasionally.
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  76

  Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas

  by snowbird in

  1. social
  2. current

  guilty of sexually harassing anita hill?.

  i say no.. what say you?.

  this came up on the arlen specter thread, but i feel it needs a thread of its own.. thanks.. syl.

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  mindmelda

  The laws on sexual harassment are so strict and emcompassing that most men are guilty of it...mentally. LOL

  As long as you keep your fantasies to yourself, no one cares,I sure don't. I once worked at a mill where I was one of two women who worked with over 200 men.

  I got sexually harassed every day, nearly, for the first month I was there, some sort of "hazing" I guess, to see how tough I was, which is pretty much the case when you invade any new group. I didn't report it, because it was mild crap, for the most part. I handled it by finding out the names of the wives or mothers of every guy who said something sexually disgusting to me and I told them I'd call their wife or mother and tell them what they said if they kept doing it.

  It pretty much stopped for me. (One guy asked me if I'd really do that, and I just smiled at him and recited his wife's name and telephone number and said, "You bet D____...I'll put her fucking speed dial if I need to"... this guys' wife was on the school board, so I really had the goods on him. LOL)

  The other woman I worked with reported them all to her father, who was a shift supervisor and he did exactly shit about it, because it's a fricking men's club and he wasn't going to rat anyone out! They never stopped harassing the other woman, and she finally quit.

  But, I got along with everyone famously after I told them what I was going to do if they didn't knock it the hell off, I think they respected that a lot more than me whining about their little potty mouth pranks to the supervisor. Sometimes, it's just better to take care of shit yourself, you know?
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  9

  Being Comfortable with the Presence of Mystery

  by man in black in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i was reading an article about this subject, and the author was explaining how so many new discoveries in space right now are hard to explain.. these comments were also made:.

  livio (the author) also picks up on an intriguing theme left dangling in my lovely easter conversation with vatican astronomers guy consolmagno and george coyne the enduring question of whether mathematical truths, laws of nature, are discovered or invented.

  he unapologetically offers his conclusion that there is no either/or answer possible here that mathematics is both invented and discovered.

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  mindmelda

  I'll never know everything, so I figure I'd better get comfortable with mystery. LOL

  In life, I think you have to balance the drive to know and learn with at some point realizing that access to knowledge is limited by many things, situations and circumstances, and accept that.
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  91

  Armageddon

  by sayitsnotso in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  i'm beginning to have some doubts about my doubts.

  this subject is one of them.. many argue that it is unfair, unloving, and unjust for god to destroy 99.9% of all mankind at armageddon.

  but didn't this happen before in the days of noah?

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  mindmelda

  I guess that's true if you believe in the Great Flood. However, since there's no real geological evidence of a world wide flood during human habitation of the earth, I don't. The last time the whole earth was completely under water was long before humans came on the scene.

  Believe me, something like that would be more obvious than the K-T boundary layer in the earth telling us that a meteorite hit the earth around the same time the dinosaurs went extinct by unusually large amount of iridium (an element found mainly in meteorites) in the soil layer, also know as The Alvarez Hypothesis.

  I do believe that a quite large, catatrophic local flood, which IS totally possible, that wiped out large numbers of settlements, may have happened and given rise to the biblical flood myth. It's theorized that this ancient flood might have shaped the more current parameters of the Mediterannean, which had previously been two isolated bodies of water.
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  19

  Satan and demons

  by XPeterX in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  has anyone ever felt the presence of demons in the past?a lot of jws have told me that they had or got beaten,heard voices,whispers etc.is it true?.

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  mindmelda

  I have weird experiences all the time. I quit trying to explain it and now just enjoy it for what it is, whatever it is.

  I probably have some neurological atypical whatchamacallit, but as long as it doesn't impair me and I'm having fun, who cares?